Category: Travel

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Remembering Torino

View from the Basilica Of Superga over Turin and the Alps beyond

Sunshine on the Po – Sunday 22 April 2012

Walking through a shower of blossom.
Sitting on planks over the river drinking a coffee.
Sunday morning market along the Murrazzi.
Two sparrows squabbling, making enough noise for an army.
White lion guarding the base of Garibaldi’s statue.
Light glinting off the river.
Car horns on the bridge, boats on the river.
Ducks swimming and a bloom of brown blossom petals on the surface.
A couple slow dancing under the arches of a bridge, the woman softly crooning.
A black crow perches on a white log in the river, pecking at something invisible.
Everything is good. Sun on my face. The river, purposeful yet calm, unhurried.

Cafe tables on a terrace by the River Po, Turin, Italy

I cross the river, and catch the bus to Sassi, then the old rack railway up the mountain. On the train from Florence, before we reached the city, I noticed this white Baroque church, perched on the top of a mountain, with no apparent reason for being there. When the train reaches the top of the hill, I can do nothing but marvel and point my camera. Round central tower in yellow stucco, surrounded by classical white pillars and porticoes, topped with a grey dome housing the bell. However high I am, I’m always driven to go higher, so in the yellow church I climb the steps up to the top of the tower and look down on the terracotta roof of the nave. The white peaks of the mountains surround and mesmerise me.

Notes from a mountain – Monday 23 April 2012

Ilze’s back at work today.

‘Why not take the train into the mountains? she suggests. ‘It takes 29 minutes to get to Avigliana and 1 hour 22 minutes to Bandonecchia’.

I get out at Avigliana and walk around the town. There doesn’t seem much to see and I’m not sure what I’m looking for. I walk towards a church, past some pretty old buildings, along a road out of the town and up a hill. Along a path through woods to a spot by a small stone tower with a view out over the valley and towards the bigger mountains. I’ve brought a picnic of bits and pieces, a salad of cherry tomatoes and mozzarella left over from last night’s dinner, a packet of Tuc biscuits bought from the trolley-man on a train somewhere (Rome to Florence, I think, or Florence to Turin), a Bounty, an apple and a Ritter sport with nuts. A feast. This seems like a good place to eat it.

Sometimes I find myself in a place, and I don’t really know why I’m there or what I should be doing or where I am exactly. Most often, it’s in a city. Today it’s on the side of a mountain. Not a big, glamorous mountain, I don’t know its name, maybe it doesn’t have one. It’s just part of the great chain of mountains, I guess, a fractal part of something bigger, where does it end and where does the something else begin?

In the valley below me is a house with a balcony and steps up to a terrace above part of the ground floor. Earlier I saw a person moving and then an animal, I think a cat, though it could have been a dog (hard to judge size from here) walking across the terrace. On the walk up here from the station I was thinking about the similarity of the Latin words for the cat family, Felis, and for happiness or good fortune, felicitas. And it seems appropriate, so I wonder if it’s coincidence or if there is some deep connection in the roots of language.

There seems to be someone on the balcony, leaning on the rail, but they haven’t moved for a while, so maybe it’s not a person at all. Or maybe they’re looking and thinking: ‘there’s a person up there, sitting on a rock up on the side of the mountain’.

Now there’s a car, or a white van, moving away from the house. I can hear birds all around, and distant traffic, an intermittent sound that could be humming if it was more regular, maybe someone chopping logs. A plane. Sounds that could be thunder in the mountains but hopefully is just more planes.

Into the soundscape comes a train. I wonder if it’s going towards Bardonecchia or back to Turin. Whichever, I’ve missed it now.

from Single to Sirkeci, by Linda Rushby

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Carcassonne, Saturday 17 March 2012

Bienvenue à Carcassonne

There’s something raucous going on further down the platform, maybe the French version of a hen party, people in brightly coloured curly wigs making loud screechy noises. Outside the station, entrance roads are cordoned off, lots of police standing around, and police cars. Then I see a banner with the word ‘Carnaval’ on it, and today’s date.
I dodge out of the way of the reversing police van, and realise I’m standing at the taxi rank – exactly what I want. After the farce in Sète I’m not taking any more chances with buses.
A taxi pulls up and I show the driver my notebook with the address, neatly written in block capitals. He frowns and shakes his head. Pulls out a map and starts opening it, folding it, unfolding it, studying it. Takes my notebook and stares hard at it, then throws it down on the passenger seat, shaking his head some more. Turns the map upside down and looks at it again. Speaks into his radio mic, then puts it back.
‘They’ll call me in 5 minutes.’
‘You’re a taxi driver, for goodness sake!’ I want to shout at him. ‘Don’t
you know your own city?’
He picks up the notebook again and holds it against the map, then takes the mic and speaks into it some more. At last he nods, smiles, hangs up, passes me back my notebook.
‘It’s okay! It’s okay! We go!’
On the radio someone is talking in excited tones, it sounds like a sports commentary, and I hear the word ‘Angleterre’, then voices singing the Marseillaise. Can’t help humming along – wait a minute, maybe it’s a rugby match, England versus France. Mid-March, time for the Six Nations. From the singing, it doesn’t sound too good for our lads.


Within 10 minutes we’ve reached the mediaeval city walls. There’s a barrier across the road, the sort that lifts up to let the traffic through. We stop.
‘It’s in there’ he gestures through the gate. ‘Place de Saint-Jean.‘
‘What?’ That’s as far as he’s taking me?
He points up the cobbled street, then at the meter.
I walk past the barrier, through the crowds of tourists around the gate. What if it’s like Mont Saint-Michel, all those steps? My heart sinks.
I pass a one-man band, in cod-mediaeval costume and with his nose painted red, sitting in an alcove. Narrow cobbled streets, the Wardrobe bumping and grumbling behind me. Alleys lead off in all directions, no signposts, I just keep going, with no idea where to. Past cafés and tourist-tat shops, a set of stocks with a dummy in a shabby wig, a well, a haunted house. Looking for Le Logis des Remperts, 3, rue du Moulin D’Avar.

At the Place de Saint-Jean, I can’t see any signs. I double back on myself, and in the next street, outside the Haunted House, there’s a map. The Rue du Moulin is in the opposite corner of the square, a narrow alleyway, and on the left, a sign reading ‘Le Logis des Remperts’. A gate leads into a small courtyard, with loungers, plant pots, table and chairs, and a door in the wall. I knock, but there’s no response.
I get the laptop out of the bag and set it up on the table, looking for the details. No luck. I must not have saved it. And I can’t get online to recheck the email. But there’s a phone number.

‘There should be somebody there but maybe they didn’t hear you.’ The nice lady gives me the security code for the key pad. ‘I think you’re in room 1.’
I tap in the code, and open the door. Inside, Room 1 is to my left, on the ground floor mercifully, and the key is in the lock. I open the door and let myself in.
Bare stone walls, a double bed, sofa, table, microwave, fridge and sink in the corner. Tea, coffee and instant hot chocolate. Milk, butter and orange juice in the fridge.
Outside, I take a few steps down the street, turn left and find myself out on the city walls. A chilly wind blows over my face in the drizzly afternoon, up here on the hillside. Past the cream stone blocks and crenellations, I look down on the red-roofed white apartment blocks and churches of the modern town, dotted with bare winter trees and dark evergreens, the river snaking through its valley, and in the distance the white-speckled pyramids of the mountains, under low grey clouds.


Wandering around the old town, it’s hard to keep my bearings – too many little winding streets, full of cafes, restaurants, crêperies, shops selling jewellery, wine, local delicacies, post cards, arts and crafts, toys, books and so on and on. That looks like a good café, must pop back later for a hot chocolate. Which way now? What’s round this corner? Oh – I’m pretty sure I saw that shop window with the twee fairy figurines half an hour ago – how did I get back here? And where’s that café?


I’m back at the Rue du Moulin again. Might as well pop in and see if someone’s turned up.
They didn’t say I was supposed to wait for them, did they? I used my credit card to book the room online, I guess that’s good enough.
There’s a leaflet of events on the hall table, with a list of amazing acts performing in the Carnaval. Never mind the mediaeval city, I really must have fallen into a time-warp: Johnny Halliday (is he really still alive? Or is it some kind of character franchise, like Dr Who or James Bond?); The Alan Parsons Project; Duran Duran.


The crowds are thinning out now, but I’m still walking. Back at the drawbridge the one-man-band is still in his niche. There’s something particularly tuneless and irritating about his efforts, but he seems happy enough.
I follow the sound of much more tuneful and interesting music. A group in mediaeval costumes are performing, dancing, juggling, all very festive, but no sign of Johnny Halliday.
The crêperies and shops are starting to close, outside displays being taken in, shutters closing over windows. I get my chocolat chaud, but almost have the table cleared away under me.


I walk onto the ramparts and watch the changing colours of the clouds, from grey to pink, purple and red. As the sun sinks the world turns chilly, but somewhere a blackbird is singing. My phone has run out of battery, but after all, no camera can really capture that feeling of watching a beautiful sunset.

From ‘Single to Sirkeci‘, Linda Rushby

Le Logis des Remperts – my home for two nights, under cloud and sunshine.

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Decisions

Today I have a decision to make.

It’s not earth-shattering – it’s this: should I take my camper van to the country park, have a walk through the trees and a picnic? Should I go to B&Q, buy some compost and plants, come home and do some gardening? Should I do both, drive the camper van to B&Q en route to the country park and hope to find a parking place not too far from home when I get back, so it’s not too much of an effort to carry the compost etc home? Should I take the car (camper van too tricky to park) and go to the garden centre that’s en route to the country park (if I can remember where it is, I’ve only been a couple of times, and that was years ago), and if I do, does my parking season ticket for the country park cover the car as well?

Yesterday I bought rolls and individually wrapped flap jacks in preparation for this picnic that I was planning. But – isn’t the country park getting a bit boring? I don’t want to drive the other way, to the New Forest, because that is a full day out, and does mean driving along the M27, which can be stressful. And putting the van back into the garage is always stressful. It’s only a couple of weeks since I moved the van, so it shouldn’t have seized up yet – though I did leave the battery connected up in the expectation that I’d be taking it out again in the near future. I won’t be taking it out next week, though, because I’m going up to Bedford – on the train, because hopefully my daughter will be bringing me back to stay a few days and help with sorting out the study.

I was going to go to B&Q because I have a coupon, and Wednesday is Diamond Card day, but of course you can’t combine the offers, and anyway if you read the small print the coupon only applies if you spend £30 on full price items, so it’s not great if you want to combine lots of small things, when some of them are likely to be on multi-buys anyway, so I’d spend all my time trying to work out what to spend it on.

I like the idea of going to the garden centre, but from what I remember the parking is pretty awful, so as I said, I wouldn’t want to take the van.

I’m just trying to give examples here of what my mind is like all the time. I think I’ll give myself a treat, but it takes so long to think through all the options, implications, ramifications and potential consequences that I start to dread it, even when the object is something I know I would enjoy – unless, of course, I don’t enjoy it at all and end up wondering what on earth I’m doing there, wherever it is. Which is quite likely.

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Bank Holiday

My first Bank Holiday Monday in Southsea, I walked to the seafront and had breakfast sitting on the prom outside Rocksby’s, watching the sea and the boats and the Isle of Wight, the first of many (discounting one previous occasion when I went there for breakfast as a visitor); then walked along the seafront past the castle and the common to the Square Tower, where the annual ‘May Fly’ arts festival was in progress.

This year I’m with my son, daughter-in-law and the ‘boys’ (dogs) at the ‘cabin’ (the name we seem to have settled on as sounding less pretentious than the ‘lodge’) in the Surrey Hills – hopefully another ‘first of many’. I came for a couple of odd days when they first picked up the keys and for my birthday, when things were still in lockdown. Now it’s busier – the swimming pool is open, but for pre-booked sessions for single-cabin-only groups, and yesterday morning I booked a slot and had my first swim since September in Cyprus, all by myself in the empty pool. It was glorious, but the changing rooms aren’t open, so I had to walk back with my clothes on over a wet swimsuit – which was okay, apart from the seat of my jeans, which got soaked, and I hadn’t brought a spare set of bottoms because I’m travelling on the train and had shoved everything into my backpack – including my swimsuit and towel, which my son scoffed at but I really enjoyed that swim. My daughter-in-law kindly lent me a pair of trousers while they dried over the radiator.

It’s close enough for me to easily come over for a day, and I have my own key now so I can come whether or not they’re here. Admittedly it’s a hundred mile round trip, but not a bad one, mostly on the A3.

Tuesday 4 May 2021

I didn’t finish writing yesterday because the others got up and I never got back to it. So I’ll cheat today and just add to what I’ve already written.

There’s not much to say. We went out for a lovely walk across the fields in the sunshine, came back and then the weather changed and it was wild and stormy all afternoon. We played board games, laughed and got grumpy as families do. The wind is still wild now, but it’s not raining.

Going home today. It’s been a flying visit, but a peaceful one. Home today, on the train. Never want to leave, never want to go back. I don’t know how to get round that. I don’t know how to fight off the great waves of hopelessness that well up from time to time. Is there an answer? I’ve been looking for one for so long. Being with people helps sometimes; sometimes it makes it worse. Ditto being on my own, the advantage being not having to consider and deal with the reactions of others.

The wind howls around me, but the sun is still shining.

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Life-Writing, Fractals and Plasterers’ Vans

I’ve been listening to Maya Angelou’s autobiographies, which have been serialised on BBC Sounds, each volume in five fifteen minute episodes. I’ve just played the first episode of a new volume, I think it’s the fifth, and I’ve worked out she is about thirty when it starts.  

I’m not going to say any more about it, and obviously I’m not in any way comparing myself to her in terms of either writing skill or inherent interest of the story, but it did set me thinking about the issues of writing about one’s own life. This is of course because I’m psyching myself up to go back to working on The Long Way Back (when I’ve finished with my current editing job, and if I don’t get caught up in anything else). Maybe when the cafés open again, and I can take my notebook style laptop (bought in late 2019 to encourage myself to go out and do just that, hah! What great timing that was!)

The thing about writing about your own life is the clash between the time it takes to write about it and the time it takes to live it- something I remember writing about at the time when I was travelling, and berating myself for not spending enough time writing. Time has this trick of passing no matter what your intentions or what you actually do (or don’t do) with it. And how do you ever stop? How do you write some kind of conclusion? You make a decision, you find a way to tie up the loose ends which are still dangling from the narrative, but if you don’t jump on it and get it done (and I am clearly not a jump-on-it-and-get-it-done kind of person), events overtake you, and how do you account for them?

I just got distracted by a van parked across the road, with the front passenger door open and covering part of the company name, so that it looks like: ‘X&Y PUG limited’ and I’ve been waiting for someone to close the door so I can see what it really is – I keep thinking ‘Pugh’ except that I can see there’s no ‘h’ on the end and there are some letters covered up, so that makes no sense. But when the full name’s revealed, it’s ‘X&Y PLASTERING’, my eyes had just conflated the beginning of the L with the end of the N to make U. How boring.

I intended to carry on what I was writing about yesterday, and not get distracted into life-writing and plasterers’ vans. I couldn’t see the connection between the former and the ideas of granularity and fractals that were rattling around my brain, but then I realised there was a connection. Writing about your own life is like having a hypothetical map of the world on a scale of 1:1 – it covers the whole world. If the grains are fine enough, doesn’t it appear continuous? So how to structure it into a narrative? TBC…

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The Long Way Back

Yesterday was the anniversary of one of my most vividly-remembered days described in ‘Single to Sirkeci’, when I arrived at Port Camargue. Earlier in the week I was remembering Prague, and it all set me thinking about ‘The Long Way Back’, and whether I’m ever going to finish it. I’ve been thinking about it for years – or, more accurately, I’ve been avoiding thinking about it. At first I used to start each year with the resolution that: ‘this is the year I’ll finish and publish it!’, but gradually I got over that, and recently I have been trying to learn to let it go, along with all my other failures.

I spent about six months, from autumn 2017 to spring 2018, trying to make something of it. It started with the ‘rump’ of around forty thousand words describing the return half of the journey from Istanbul back to England, which I’d chopped from the sixth draft of ‘Single to Sirkeci’. Prior to deciding to split the manuscript, I’d spent a couple of years on the herculean task of trying to edit the 200k word first draft down by half, and after brushing off multiple suggestions of chopping it into two books, and stalling at 140k, I gave in to the inevitable.

When I published ‘S2S’ in early 2017, the plan for ‘The Long Way Back’ was to combine the material I had on the return journey with a briefer description of what had happened after my return; my time in Prague; my moving to Southsea; and some reflections on lessons learned from the ‘life journey’ (if I could think of any) – I even wrote an introduction and blurb to that effect, which I must dig out some time when I need a good laugh at the ironies of over-ambition.

Giving myself six months to deal with cancer and chemo, I started in September 2017 to go through blog posts from the time between returning ‘home’ at the start of August 2012, and departing for Prague in May 2013. Rather than the planned précis, I found myself editing a tale of disappointment, depression and yearning, as I struggled to come to terms with life – while, in the present, also struggling to come to terms with moving on from cancer. This resulted in a further fourteen thousand words to add to the forty, and I hadn’t even started on Prague – which, when I went back to it, was also a saga of depression and disappointment, although alleviated in places just by the fact of being in Prague. Then there was the year after, living back with my ex (working title: ‘Madwoman in the Attic’), mystery illness, moving to Southsea – and then what?

For a while I toyed with the idea of turning Prague into a third volume, and spent some time trying to find three–syllable words starting with either ‘B’ or ‘R’ to make a catchy title: ‘Bohemian Something-or-other’ but with no luck.

Then I just stopped. I just stopped writing.

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Vyšehrad

The other evening when I was cooking dinner, Radio 4 Extra was on in the background, playing ‘Soul Music’ – a programme which you can only imagine being made by the BBC. Each episode takes a piece of music which has a ‘powerful emotional impact’, with a handful of speakers talking about it and what it means to them. It is a wonderfully eclectic programme, and the musical pieces come from everywhere: ‘Life on Mars’, ‘Once in a Lifetime’, ‘I Wonder as I Wander’, ‘Sunshine on Leith’ (I’ve never heard of that one), ‘Lean on Me’ and ‘Dock of the Bay’ plucked from a list on the website.

This week it was a classical piece which at first I didn’t recognise and wasn’t paying much attention to, when I heard a voice saying something about a hill which was supposed to be the site of the original castle, rather than the current castle further down the river on the other side, but this was just part of the foundation myth of the city… and it dawned on me that they were talking about Prague. Then it cut to a piece of music which I definitely recognised, but couldn’t have told you the name or composer, and I heard the words: ‘Vltava’ and I knew before I heard it that the site they were talking about was Vyšehrad.

Vyšehrad was one of my favourite walking places when I wanted to avoid the tourist crowds. It was directly across the river Vltava from my flat, something that I only realised when I was there and looking back to my side of the river managed to pick out the funny little church across the road from me. But to get there I had to take one tram to the interchange at Novy Smichov, near the big Tesco, and then change to get across the river bridge, get off and either catch another tram back up the river or walk along that side. Once, not so long ago, I could have told you all the tram numbers, but I don’t remember now.

But I have to tell you first that the music was by Smetana, one of the three great classical Czech composers, the other two being Dvořák and Janáček. Smetana was the only one I’d never heard of before I went to Prague. ‘Vyšehrad’ and ‘Vltava’, I learned from ‘Soul Music’, are two of six ‘symphonic poems’ that make up a patriotic symphonic cycle called ‘Má vlast’ (‘My Fatherland’), inspired by the history, legends and landscapes of Bohemia.

I have seen his grave in the cemetery on Vyšehrad, overlooking the vineyards reaching down the castle mound towards the river. I wrote at least one blog post about it, but on a blog which is now defunct (though I still have the content somewhere). I was walking there on a Sunday afternoon in February, seven years ago, when I read the text from my daughter that brought me home to England by the next Wednesday…

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The Sixth Age

The rain has stopped, the sun is out, but I can still hear the wind – which isn’t good, because tomorrow my son and daughter-in-law are coming to put up the new garden shed. Will it stand in this wind? Anybody’s guess. I hope so, because we get storms every winter.

I have been gradually emptying out the old shed over the last two weeks. There’s not much stuff left in there, and I’m planning to get it out today or tomorrow morning before they get here. That’s the plan.

I was talking a while ago about the Madwoman in the Attic years, those times when there were issues in the future that were going to resolve everything (if positive, like getting a job, finding a new lover, travelling, publishing a book, living by the seaside) or were being ignored (if scary, like settling down and finding a home for all my Stuff). In the last few years, I have come to accept that the former group are either never going to happen (the job and the lover), or have happened without really resolving things as I’d hoped they would (the travelling, the books and living at the seaside – though I don’t regret any of them, especially the last). In fact it’s been the settling down and finally having a place that feels like ‘home’ which has been the saving grace for me, though managing the Stuff is a big issue which still needs to be resolved.

The first year and a half of living in the flat near the beach felt in many ways like a continuation of the travelling years – or maybe the first year did, because the last six months was taken up with the stress of house buying, emptying out the old house in Bedford, and arranging for all the Stuff to come to rest here. Then the next year was taken up with dealing with cancer. So I suppose I could say I’ve had three years to date of adjusting to the ways my life is now. People talk about ‘the Third Age’, but in Shakespearean terms, I see this as the Sixth Age – the penultimate one.  

Why am I thinking in these terms today? A couple of weeks ago my therapist asked me what I want to do with my future, what I would do if money was no object. But money isn’t the problem – I have enough money for anything I need, and I can’t think of anything I want that would require money I don’t have. If I came into more money unexpectedly, I would probably give it to my children, or maybe put it in trust for my grandchildren. Perhaps I’ll have some nice holidays when travel becomes a possibility again, though I’ll never be able to travel as freely as I did before.

I spoke too soon about the weather. Rain and hail are driving against the window. Shed emptying, dismantling and erecting might not be possible this weekend after all.   

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Tackling the Chaos: Memories Lost and Overwhelmed

Clicking through photos again to track down another one which came up on my desktop recently, I thought it was from Sête in Provence, but it was a little further east along the coast, at Le Grau du Roi in the Camargue, taken on a very grey and damp Spring Equinox in 2012 (of course). Which reminds me of my late friend Douglas Jeal, who, after hearing my tales, went to the south of France at around the same time the following year, then grumbled at me because the weather was horrible. What did he expect? Well, he had lived in Barcelona for a while, which has its own microclimate, so I suppose he can’t be blamed for thinking it might be similar  a few hundred miles along the Mediterranean coast.

What else does that remind me of? A few days ago the image on my desktop was of a map of that corner of the Med, a mural on the wall of Bordeaux station, where I was stranded for a couple of hours or so during a train strike when I was en route from Brittany to northern Spain. Something piqued my interest when I saw it again, but I couldn’t remember what it was, so I opened the file in Photoshop to check, and still can’t see why. It’s quite a poor quality photo – from an old, pre-Smart Nokia phone – so zooming in hasn’t helped. Maybe it will come to me.

I’ve mentioned before about the Magic Refilling Data pot, and how my efforts at clearing space on my google Drive by downloading photos from Google photos to my hard drive and then deleting them from Google photos were being thwarted because every morning my phone was being backed up to another file on Google Drive. Over several days (because it takes a long time to select and delete that many photos and my PC is four years old and quite creaky – and also it was refilling again every morning with the ones I hadn’t backed up and removed from my phone) I managed to get all the photos up to the end of 2020 from my phone, onto my hard drive, and removed from the backup file on Google drive. The day came when I logged on to my computer, opened my Gmail, and was informed that I had used 11 Gb of my 15Gb allocation. That lasted a couple of hours before the messages started to appear telling me that my Google Drive was full again.

I listed all files in descending file-size, and found that the photos I’d already deleted were still appearing on the list. By clicking on each file, I was given a side panel with details, including the folder where the file was located. Clicking on the name of the folder led me up the tree to the folder where it was, and so on until I reached a folder called ‘Desktop’, and above that, another one called ‘Computers’… tbc

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Looking for Love

Recently I realised that this year marks ten years since the last time I fell ‘in lurve’. It started in February, and was finished at the end of July, when the other party’s (supposedly) estranged wife decided she wanted him back, and he went.

A friend had tried to warn me quite early on (towards the end of April, when I was beginning to believe I’d finally met a man who genuinely cared about me) not to ‘…get involved in someone else’s train wreck…’, but of course, I was the fool who went rushing in. I’d been on my own for two years, I was tired of chatting to men online, meeting them once and convincing myself that they were really nice, interesting guys who were worth getting to know, only to find that they disappeared without a word or made it obvious that all they wanted from me was sex. Yes, I knew that he was jumping straight into a new relationship, and that that was dangerous, but I’d had my time in the wilderness, and I was sure that if I just gave him time and space to see how well we fitted together…

Well, if I ever meet that woman, I will thank her from the bottom of my heart, because if we’d stayed together, I wouldn’t have caught the Eurostar nine years ago today and gone travelling, never have lived in Prague, never have moved to Southsea… Of course, at that time, I wasn’t expecting it to be the last romantic relationship of my life. I thought maybe I’d been trying too hard, I should stop looking for love, I should just give up and wait for it to happen naturally – I was a free spirit, I would take my pleasure wherever it came my way, I would live the Bohemian life I’d always dreamt of, and some day, I’d fall in love again.

I won’t say I can count the number of times men have ‘come on’ to me in those years on the fingers of one hand – I can count them on my thumbs. The first was the old boy on the bus in Rome (‘Single to Sirkeci’, p165). The other was in my first summer in Southsea, one Friday afternoon in a pub overlooking the harbour, as I was settling myself with a pint of cider, and waiting for my fish and chips, when a creepy middle-aged man plonked himself down at my table with the words: ‘I don’t mind sharing if you don’t!’. (In case you’re wondering, there were plenty of empty tables, and I removed myself to one straight away).

For a few years, I still hankered after the fantasy of finding love – or at least, occasional male company. I used to wonder: what’s so awful about me that no one wants me? Is it my looks, personality, intellect, expectations too high, or too low? Is it just bad luck – or maybe good luck – that I’m the way I am?